A letter to my past self about having a first IVF baby
I'm currently staring at a giant red plastic sharps container sitting entirely too close to my half-empty, ice-cold mug of coffee on the bathroom counter. Itβs six months ago, and my best friend Rachel is sobbing on the phone because...
Surviving The Absolute Carnage Of The Modern Envy Baby Phase
At precisely 2:14 PM last Tuesday, Florence made the fatal mistake of looking at a blue plastic cup. She didn't touch the cup. She didn't even point her sticky, jam-covered finger at the cup. She merely glanced at it with...
The Heaviest Baby Ever Born: Ultrasound Lies And My Giant Kid
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with Leo, sitting on crinkly white paper in a freezing cold exam room, wearing a pair of gray maternity leggings that I had definitely spilled iced coffee on earlier that morning. My ultrasound tech, a...
Exactly How Many Babies Are Born in the US Each Year?
It was 4:12 a.m. on a particularly bleak Tuesday when I found myself sliding down a demographic rabbit hole. Maya, who's technically twin A but behaves aggressively like a middle child, had decided that sleep was a social construct she...
How Tall Is Lil Baby: Growth Charts And Late Night Googling
It's 3 AM in Chicago. The radiator in my pre-war apartment is clanking like a percussion section, the snow is piling up against the window, and my kid has been cluster feeding for what feels like three consecutive lunar cycles....
Hydrocephalus Baby: The 2 AM ER Trip That Changed Our Entire Lives
I remember the exact hum of the vending machine in the Lubbock pediatric ER. It was somewhere around three in the morning. I hadn't washed my hair in four days, I was wearing leggings permanently covered in lint from packing...
My 3 AM Panic Over a Constipated Baby (And What Actually Works)
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub wearing my husband Gregβs oversized Syracuse Lacrosse t-shirt, which had a suspicious spit-up stain on the shoulder that I had just decided to...
The NICU, My Sanity, And The Wild History Of The Coney Island Baby
3:17 AM. St. Jude's NICU. November. I was wearing my husband Dave's oversized grey hoodie that smelled distinctly like stale Dunkin Donuts and absolute panic, just sitting there staring at the translucent skin of my son Leo's tiny chest rising...
My Kid is Obsessed with Chiquita Baby Monster and I Am Tired
It was 7:14 AM on a Tuesday, which in my house is basically the witching hour but with more aggressive demands for waffles. I was standing in the kitchen wearing a robe that distinctly smelled like old milk and failure,...